My guest is Sunder Katuala. Sonda Katwala is the director of the think tank British Future and his book, How to Be a Patriot, Why Love of Country Can End Our Very British Culture War, has just been published. Welcome to the podcast, Sunder. Great to be here, Paul.

Right. Before we talk about your book, just a few words, please, for our listeners about what British Future is and how long it's been around and why we're set up please. British Future is a charity and think tank dealing with issues of identity

and we founded it in 2012 and it would like Britain to be confident, welcoming, inclusive and fair.

So everyone's going to agree with that. But I was worried that we had these big

identity divides in our society and that people who were maybe liberal in favour of diversity

and migration weren't very good at understanding why other people weren't. So it's an attempt to

build common ground on issues that could divide us. And at first sight, writing a book with Patriot, the title is Patriotism often is seen as

at best a kind of quaint concept, at worse, a source of a lot of tension, even violence in society.

So what was the inspiration for the book?

It's a very personal book. I mean, it's about me and my country.

And before I was, you know, before I was running

think tanks or in journalism, you know, I was a kid growing up, you know, an Indian dad,

Irish mother, mixed race, Irish Catholic, Evertonian. And, you know, I didn't know that was

complicated until I hit my teenage years and you realise that

the whole history of Britain, Ireland, India, empire race is quite complicated, people have got

views about it and I'm I'm confident about my country by experience of realising when

I was 14 that you know some people had questions about that but if that's who you are

that's something you can put things together. But what helped was these conversations were

going my way in the 1990s. You were 96. Football's coming in. That was a much better Englishness

than the one we'd seen, you know, football hoogynism before Brit Pop I quite liked. The culture and

politics of John Major and then New Labour,

this country is becoming more inclusive.

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